The Washington Post gave five pages to a former aid worker who tried desperately to colonize Helmand Province, Afghanistan. The USA's attempt at foreign domination has collapsed. This neo-missionary 'aid' fails because it is not revolutionary, it is reactionary. The point is to dominate and control, not protect and assist.

The news came in a phone call from Afghanistan. Ten days ago, a suicide bomber tried to talk his way into a compound in Lashkar Gah where I had worked until last October. He blew himself up without getting in and no one else was seriously hurt, but the story shook me. What I had expected for so long had finally happened.

I went to Afghanistan in October 2005 to work on an economic development project funded by the U.S. government. I went because I believed in the mission: helping to improve the quality of life in a war-torn land. I was lucky to get out.

Right on the heels of writing---and trying to keep back tears---about pre-invasion Afghanistan, the WP publishes this incredible, must-read article. The 'economic aid' woman who got a lot of loot trying to convince these peasants to grow...? Nothing. She came back to her imperial home to rest upon her laurels (i.e.---her pay) and whine about what a mess the place is where the world's two biggest, nastiest empires have utterly destroyed, playing 'Risk'.

She whines about not being able to go shopping or anywhere, for that matter. I remember when not only one could go shopping for anything, literally, in Afghanistan, it was easy as pie! And safer than shopping in many inner cities in the USA back in the sixties and seventies! The grim landscape this leech presents (how sweet of her to line her own nest, trying to 'fix' a place she and her allies destroyed!) was not visible to us hippies when we used to go there to hang out and learn from the farmers, herders and merchants, how to do things. How to make a pot, weave a rug, tend sheep...all the things the tribes and clans of Afghanistan have done successfully for eons.

The invading Americans had to pretend we were bringing democracy and freedom when we were actually simply parking our asses in Afghanistan so we can threaten Iran, China and Russia all at once. Using it as a home base for military spying on its neighbors, we imagine that no one else can figure this out. I keep talking about the ancient Chinese/Japanese game of 'Go' which means '5' in Japanese: it is difficult to connect even five squares without opposition counteracting it.

In this international game, we think, since we have troops in 130+ nations, we control world events in our favor everywhere! The problem with playing this game with mostly military forces is, as resistance rises, the cost of holding these bases rise and the chance that the whole thing can collapse is very high.

One can only hold bases so long as the people surrounding these bases want them to exist. And it is painfully obvious that the Afghanis don't want us running their country, thank you. It never ceases to marvel me, how aid workers feel they are fixing things while few if any of them have even the slightest understanding of how things really work, the evolution of societies in various climates and other factors.

For example, Western aid workers went into Africa to dig wells. They figured this would bring hope and wealth to Africans who were living as seasonal nomads. I lived in the desert during my childhood and have a great appreciation of the value of water and the dangers of wells. I watched Americans destroy the Tucson water table, draining the rivers and in general, destroying the place because they stupidly wanted water-flushing toilets and daily baths in a very dry desert!

This will end badly. Eventually, even nomads won't be able to pick through the ruins because there is no water table unless a new Ice Age comes and replenishes it! In Africa, these wells attracted what was once widely scattered herders. They then hung out there because there was endless water. The animals stripped the land bare of all vegetation. The desert moved in. To survive, the herders had to fight each other, they were increasingly sedentary and this has led to...Darfur.

I will note that once the USA and Israel armed the PLO to attack the elected officials of Hamas, the need to wave Darfur in front of our eyes has collapsed and no one mentions the place anymore outside of the Chinese who seem ready to take over all our affairs in Africa.

Which goes back to the whining American 'aid worker' who did nearly zero work for the Afghanis: the Chinese aren't coming into Africa with bombs, troops and guns! They are coming there with trade. I would strongly suggest, if we let them do that to Afghanistan, they would at least make some money.

But that would mean they would win the World Go Game too. This, we cannot allow. The Russians gave Afghanistan 'aid workers' back in the sixties. As revolutionaries (hahaha) they brought liberalism, women's education, newspapers and electrical projects like the Aswan dam in Egypt. When the Afghanis got grumpy, the Russians pulled off their 'aid worker' masks and lunged into open warfare, assassinations and coups.

Which is how all 'aid' ends. People eager to do business go to great lengths to do business. Drug dealers show this quite clearly. The only reason 90% of America's farmers aren't growing poppy and pot is due ONLY to the fact that we are in a police state of extreme brutality and government subsidies of traditional, poor-paying farming! So why aren't we simply paying the farmers of Afghanistan $50,000 a year to NOT grow wheat, for example?

Like we do here, the government keeps farm prices up by restricting imports (ooops! Um, free trade...gack!) and bribes to keep down production. When free trade started, I used to have sheep. A lot of sheep. Made a good profit off of them. Then free trade opened America's markets to sheep goods from Australia so Australia would support American imperialism in Asia and then to surround Russia with enemies, our government decided to open the floodgates of Mongolia and China and my sheep went from $175 a head to less than $30 a head. A tremendous financial loss for me!

The Afghanis are famous shepherds. They, too, have been devastated by international trade. Their valuable sheep are now nearly worthless. Their wheat, worthless due to food aid. This has killed farmers in Africa, too. The more food we give them, the more we destroy their farms. Europe and Asia protected their own farmers by keeping out American food. Farmers in India are committing suicide because of American, European and Asian food flooding into India.

The stupid aid worker in this WP article, Ms. Higgins, doesn't talk about any of this. She doesn't mention how farmers in South Korea traveled all over the world to disrupt the final Doha rounds. How they committed suicide in public, how the military shot them, beat them and they fought back with tremendous ferocity! Oh, geeze? Fighting peasants. Hmmm. I think I see something here.

She didn't talk about this because she is a reactionary working for the empire and her sole function was to stop the peasants from interfering with the military's plans for world dominance. Her main job, evidently, was to instruct these farmers to grow something besides drugs. She had no alternatives, she just wanted them to stop. Did she explain to them how the imperial powers are run by rich men who desire only to suck up all the money in the world so they could be super-rich? Did she point out to them that these super-rich men were paying her and her job was to keep them on the farm and disarmed and disabled?

No? Of course not which is why Maoist rebels are taking over Nepal, for example! Indeed, either chaos, religious revivals or communist insurrections are spreading because the American imperial economic system is collapsing rapidly as the USA sinks into bankruptcy.

Far from showing people how to do things, we should be learning from them! Our path was paved on the acquisition of native lands, displacement of whole populations of humans and even the eradication of natives and of course, fighting other empires, winning and then running the world's banking systems.

Which we tried to loot. And now it is collapsing because we decided to fix our own trade/farming/industrial problems by using cheap Chinese labor and polluting Chinese lands while also raping oil-rich nations that have no nukes. Poor Afghanistan has nothing we want except it is the Keystone of Asia: all empires must march down the bloody lanes of Kabul. All must pass and all must pay the ultimate price.

The natives there are very stubborn. This is because they have seen this over and over again. The Mongols, for example, stayed because they were happy to live there, happy to be themselves and they do poorly when things are too good, anyway. The rough life of the nomad makes them strong! The idea that a rough life can be a good life escapes many people.

As someone like the Mongols, a person who has lived for many years in the mountains in a tent in the snow, without any modern conveniences, I assure everyone, it is a bracing life! Every day, an adventure. It requires many skills which the Afghanis have and which I admire hugely. The USA government could have sent me there to organize the peasants. But then, I would only go as a revolutionary and that would mean fighting and...hahaha. Obviously, the point is to defang the peasants and chain them up so they don't bother the very powerful and the very rich.

And the Afghanis know this. They aren't dumb even if they aren't well-educated. It takes brains to live the lives they live. Tolstoy fretted about all this. I read 'War and Peace' carefully every ten years or so. The 'boring' parts are where he talks about the peasants, their attitude towards life and the rulers and how quiet they are and how agricultural agents of the government fail simply because the organic life-forces at work within the peasant community is hard to understand from the outside.

But sometimes the peasants do react. Then we get massive revolutions like in Russia and China, two empires with many peasants.

But the revolutionaries' solutions failed. They didn't take into account the elderich realities of farming. Revolutionaries preaching the arcane new arts of modern technology and tools had to brutally suppress the peasants in order to get their changes across. And do note how this has collapsed! Our attempts are just as ridiculous and destructive.

Here at home, the modern factory-farm is an ecological disaster. Most farms here abouts are abandoned. They look like urban junkyards with lots of machines discarded and rusting. Many farmers no longer use barns built with love and care and standing for centuries. Instead, they use tents! I get a constant stream of tent catalogs! To keep the rivers and lakes from being destroyed by factory farms, laws are passed but all it takes is a nasty storm and all that pollution is flooded into the landscape anyway.

Using chemicals and frankenfoods, we try to race ahead of Mother Nature who uses her crafty, sharp tool called 'evolution' to undo or destroy our attempts at controlling all of nature so it would make us millionaires.

And that is what the Afghani farmers want: to make money. And selling heroin is making them richer. Much richer! And the only way to stop them is to kill all of them. And like any system that makes a lot of money, opium is killing them. It is an addictive drug that kills pain and we have made life there a royal pain.

And in the sixties, they used mostly pot. A much gentler herb. Easy to grow. You can't OD on it. Has no withdrawal symptoms. Gads. We should have left them alone. But we can't! We won't.

So they will systematically kill us, kill any aid workers we send and eventually, destroy our empire. And you can bet, they are sending REVOLUTIONARIES all over kingdom come, instructing people as to how to fight off Americans. Indeed, Iraq is the school of choice these days. So many American targets, so much time to learn!

A major dam in Kentucky is about to collapse. The Wolf Creek dam was foolishly built on limestone/karst which dissolves in water. All previous attempts at 'fixing' this has now failed and if the dam blows out, Nashville, TN, will have a New Orleans flood event.

The Commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Nashville District, announced plans Monday to lower the lake level at Lake Cumberland (Wolf Creek Dam), in Russell County, Ky., effective immediately to 680 feet, in response to Corps and independent studies that have classified the dam as being at “high risk” for structural failure.

Normal pool levels are 723 feet in the summer and 690 feet in the winter. Dam safety experts will continually monitor conditions at Wolf Creek and further reductions may be necessary depending on the effect that lower lake levels have on the dam. Lowering the lake level will reduce the risk of dam failure by decreasing water pressure on the dam and reducing foundation seepage.

These changes are in concert with ongoing rehabilitation plans at Wolf Creek that address the problem of seepage through the foundation of the dam.

Click here to enlarge picture of Wolf Creek Dam.

Like the little Dutch Boy of yore, they basically are sticking their collective fingers in this massive dike. Namely, this is the biggest dam east of the Mississippi River! No small matter. Click here to see some of the astonishing pictures of the Johnstown flood of 1889. The Johnstown flood which was caused by the collapse of a poorly-engineered dam, so traumatized Victorians, they still referred to it in cartoons, books and songs well into the 1940s. My mother's godmother who lived to be 104 years old told me about it when I was a child, she was in her 20's when it happened. I remember seeing cartoons where characters try desperately to save small orphans from that flood. It was on par with the Titanic back then.

Right now they are injecting grout like we put around tiles, into the base of this huge dam. The chances of this working is around zero. All we need is one catastrophic storm. The most likely being a hurricane. I know up here in my own mountains, the remnants of hurricanes can cause terrific floods. The steep mountainsides of the Appalachians are very prone to flooding. The Cumberland River has many dams along its great length. If this, one of the biggest and also at the head of the waters, breaks, it will probably destroy other dams below.

Flooding on the river remained a problem. Under the Flood Control Act of 1938, Corps projects were given a third purpose – flood control. Under this Act, the Nashville District investigated six reservoir sites along the Cumberland and its tributaries.

This led to the choice of Wolf Creek Project in KY for immediate construction in 1941. Congress also authorized construction of Center Hill and Dale Hollow Dams in Tennessee. Just three months after the Wolf Creek groundbreaking ceremony came the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the start of World War II for the U.S. Congress directed that the construction of Wolf Creek Dam be expedited to furnish power for southeastern war industries.

It is interesting that attempts at stopping floods usually involve building systems that will, in a catastrophic storm, make things infinitely worse. There is no rainstorm that can best a dam collapse. For example, if New Orleans was build with an eye for the actual lay of the land, no one would build in dangerous places. But since the Army Corps of Engineers berthed the Mississippi with levees, people build right next to them, heedlessly and stupidly.

No one tried to stop this and all it took was one very strong storm and it all came tumbling down in a terrible wall of water that killed thousands of people. We still are dealing with the displaced population and people are already drifting in, reestablishing homes on the floodplains.

It is the carbon dioxide in rain water which causes limestone to dissolve. In fact, as rain falls, relatively little carbon dioxide dissolves but as the water percolates through the ground it dissolves more carbon dioxide from the roots of plants. The carbon dioxide solution then causes the insoluble calcium carbonate to react as forming calcium hyrogencarbonate (bicarbonate). (Most children will have heard about sodium bicarbonate [bicarb]).

Children may need some convincing that limestone will dissolve in water containing carbon dioxide. After all, it doesn't seem to dissolve in distilled water, which we've just said contains carbon dioxide. Does it dissolve in sparkling water? The easiest way to show them is to take lime water, calcium hydroxide solution. They all know it goes milky with carbon dioxide but probably don't realise this milkiness is due to the formation of insoluble calcium carbonate. (The particles of calcium carbonate are so fine they don't easily settle out. Usually, they are fine enough to pass through most school filters papers.)

However, if you continue to pass carbon dioxide through the mixture, ie through a suspension of calcium carbonate in water, it slowly dissolves.

It is worse: we have acid rain and indeed, a major coal-burning power plant fueling all those airconditioners, is right on this river! And the other matter: excess C02 is bonding with the limestone! This irresistable process wasn't a mystery 50 years ago. Even a child back then knew about these things. I used to play with their children's chemistry sets and we dissolved rocks and did other amusing things with the simple chemicals.

It is most amusing that the geologists beg the state to curb building on limestone. They point out the biggest cave complexes in America are in the same region this collapsing dam is in and they bemoan the fact that the Army Corps of Engineers didn't check out the facts with real geologists. They gloomily note that even if warned, builders pooh-pooh them and build anyway. They even illustrate housing disasters when a hole suddenly opens without warning.

When I was a child (and I still do this) I loved to dam things. We all did this. We would erect elaborate dams only the storms in Tucson can be very violent with sudden dumps of water in great volume and our dams would get blown away. Even if they weren't, we noticed that they would degrade over time, a sure sign of this is for water to pool at the base. The base weakens, the center sags and then it overflows.

The fact that water is now turning the ground under this dam into swiss cheese can't be evaded, if one stabilizes it temporarily, this is not a real solution, it is a patch. The concept of these dams, situating them and dealing with dam collapses is part of being an engineer or geologist. Just as builders must pay attention to the foundation of a building, dam builders must evaluate the very earth the dam will sit upon. Ignoring this is folly.

Just like vacationers demanded the Federal Government remove the roadblocks to Mt. St. Helen's three weeks before it blew up and killed anyone nearby, so it is here: the vacation people will show up in four months and they will be furious if the water table is 30' lower! They will demand the level be raised and the government will yield, as usual.

And we should remember, the Johnstown tragedy was due entirely to the rich industrialists in Pittsburgh, the tycoons of laissez unfaire. They wanted to have a lot of fish in an artificial lake for their private, secretive club!

The collapse of a subway construction site in Sao Paulo, Brazil, shows the necessity of understanding the geological reality of where one is building something. All too often, escavations ignore the possibility of a collapse or signs of impending collapse are papered over or ignored. Many workers die because of this.

&hearts As usual, workers at an escavation are killed by careless or inept engineering or supervision.

Written by Francesco Neves
Friday, 12 January 2007

At least seven people are disappeared and feared dead following a landslide this afternoon at the São Paulo subway's Yellow Line in Nações Unidas avenue, on the city's west side. A truck and a microbus were swallowed by the crater of about 30 meters (100 feet).

Over my own lifetime, I have done rather a bit of backhoe work, escavating various places. Since childhood, I have enjoyed digging up the earth, burrowing into things, and my earliest lesson in all this came when I was in elementary school in Arizona. We used to dig pits and tunnels in the desert. Near where I lived for a while, the Pantano Wash was one place we were forbidden to go alone. During much of the year, it was dry but in summer or if we had a wet winter, floods would roar through it and since it came out of the surrounding mountains, storms far away could cause sudden floods which is why it was very dangerous to play there. The banks of this dry river were fairly high and the sandy bottom was dangerous due to sink holes and other hidden hazards.

One day, three of my classmates decided to ignore the nearly universal warnings we were all given about the dangers of that enticing arroyo. They didn't think it was much fun digging in the hard caliche soil of the desert so they decided to make a big tunnel into the bank of the arroyo.

They used shovels and sticks to dig and over time, their tunnel grew in size. I warned them it was not a good idea to dig so deep but they thought I was stupid. One Saturday morning, they were busy digging deep inside when the tunnel collapsed. It killed two of the children, one was able to work his way out and run off to get help which came much too late.

I watched construction of the observatory complex at Kitt Peak, too. It also was an important learning experience. Unlike the sandy subsoils of the arroyos in the Tucson valley, Kitt Peak is a mostly granite mountain, the ancient stub of great mountain building millions of years ago. Unlike the volcanic mountains that also surround Tucson, this mountain was very hard and solid in nature which is why it was selected for the observatory projects by AURA.

Due to their height and being on the highest peaks of the mountain, the observatories had to be well-anchored and to do this, they blasted away with explosives to break up the rock and of course, deep holes were drilled and all this was quite thrilling to watch, as a child. We used to use firecrackers to imitate the drilling and blasting work the adults were doing.

Of course, letting children play with firecrackers is now illegal but back in the 1950's, it was rather normal, actually. I do know a number of people who blew off a finger or two, playing with firecrackers.

The escavation work on this subway shows many signs of careless engineering as well as construction techniques. Indeed, looking at these pictures, I notice the quality of the soil: a very fine, even silt! Judging from photos while unable to touch it, the earth seems to be mostly loose volcanic dust or it is river deposits that took down from the Andes, such fine silt. Either way, it is not very integrated. When I excavate on my own mountainside, it being mostly glacial compressed earth, there are many large, loose rocks brought down from Canada, mostly quartz and if I dig down more than 50', I hit bedrock which is the roots of what was once a mountain range taller than the Himalayas around 500+ million years ago. Since I am anchoring things on this mountain, I have to build a base from these materials such as is around my present house. Compacting the loose soil while running drainage pipes along the mountainside, filling them with loose gravel which relieves water pressure on the subsoils, protects my foundation, for example.

Many builders, to save a few bucks, don't bother with much drainage or reconstituting the soil/rock mix. This is why people have wet basements or cracks in foundations, for example. This is true of large projects like the one in Brazil: builders take chances because they save money by ignoring construction dangers. And one of the top things that are skipped is escavation safety. I often say, 'Because no one sees what has been dug out, this is often the place where builders cheat.'

Hidden things are the things most often skipped over, in other words. In the case of the Brazillian tragedy, the fault lies with many responsible people, first and foremost, the architect. Looking at the walls in the photos, one can see how they go straight up. If one is building into solid rock like the subways in Manhattan, for example, large holes like the one in Brazil can be made and supported, going straight down, because it is solid rock. But in Manhattan, we also have very high walls, some over 100', lining the Henry Hudson Parkway.

Just recently, part of this collapsed onto the roadway. Hydrolic pressure behind the walls pushed them outwards. One can see this all over the place. In Troy, NY, where my family lives, there have been a number of catastrophic mountain collapses in the past. Right now, near the RPI campus, there is a vertical wall built 100 years ago that is now collapsing outwards, threatening traffic. Engineers had to berm the base with a dozen loads of large rock.

Medieval builders figured out, the higher the walls, the more they needed support and besides the built-in piers, they designed flying butresses. Medieval castle builders understood the base of a curtain wall had to be very wide in order to support the towers and stone structures above. This seemingly simple idea is ignored these days as people imagine cement and rebars are suffient within themselves.

Excavation and trenching are among the most hazardous construction operations, and the weight of soil sloughing off the side of an unprotected trench can cause a crushing blow to an employee at the bottom, resulting in a serious injury or fatality. During 2000 alone, 38 construction workers died in excavation and trench cave-ins, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ “Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries.” Last fall, for example, a 31-year-old Illinois man died after a piece of a trench wall broke loose and fell on him while he was working in a five-foot-deep trench. In Arizona, a 33-year-old man stepped out of a stacked trench box system when the trench collapsed, suffocating him. In Missouri, a worker was laying pipe in a 12-foot-deep trench with no shoring when the trench wall collapsed, burying him. Four hours later, rescuers finally were able to recover his body.

According to Jim Boom, an occupational safety and health specialist in OSHA’s Directorate of Construction, most of these fatalities would have never have occurred if the people responsible for providing a safe workplace had complied with well-known safety requirements for trenches and excavations. OSHA’s excavation standard requires employers to provide sloping, benching, shoring, or shielding to protect employees in excavations five feet or deeper. The only exception is for a trench dug in stable rock where there is no loose soil or likelihood of a cave-in.

I have often said in the past (to bosses), "OSHA rules were written in blood." This truism is self-evident. The government writes rules only after enough people die that it overcomes resistance from employers who want to save money while risking lives. Even with many deaths, though, if an industry is powerful enough, politically like the oil or coal corporations, the deaths continue and the protections remain slim as we saw this week with yet another coal mining collapse that killed some miners.

If a trench has sloping sides, the danger is much less, the more vertical the sides, the more dangerous. This is due to gravity and pressure from the sides of the trench. Namely, Nature hates a vacuum and loves to fill them, swiftly if possible. Looking at the photos of this latest disaster, I noticed a big black ground-cloth lying on the road above. It has a lot of big tires lying on top of it. How peculiar!

Down below, next to the big rig lying on its side, are even more tires! I believe the foreman or someone above him saw the fissure growing at that spot and decided to cover it up so water wouldn't get in as if such a solution would stop water from getting in! Anyway, the people ordering this were not very bright. They probably left an opening for trucks to drive through and probably that big rig in the pit was driving over this spot when it finally turned into an avalanche.

When working with fine soil like this, what responsible people do is excavate a very large pit with sides sloping backwards into the hillside or making the hole like a cone, then pouring the cement and then backfilling it with fairly uniform rock fill. I did this with my house, for example, as well as other projects in the past. The expense is well worth it since the buildings or walls last much longer. I see collapsing retaining walls all over the place because people hate spending money on things one can't see. And nothing is more hidden than good drainage, good backfill.

Rebuilding New Orleans means mostly making housing and businesses that are just as vulnerable to flooding as before. This inability to face the facts of life characterizes much of our culture. Yet we spend a fortune fixing or rebuilding stubbornly in a way that doesn't work. This is true in California as well as Tornado Alley and the Hurricane Coasts. And ranchers in the west once again have to have the government rescue them from what we up here in the Northeast consider to be fairly normal weather.

After Katrina, teams of planners recommended that broad swaths of vulnerable neighborhoods be abandoned. Yet all areas of the city have at least some residents beginning to rebuild. With billions of dollars in federal relief for homeowners trickling in, more people are expected to follow.

Moreover, while new federal guidelines call for raising houses to reduce the damage of future floods, most returning homeowners do not have to comply or are finding ways around the costly requirement, according to city officials.

"It's terrifying: We're doing the same things we have in the past but expecting different results," said Robert G. Bea, a professor of civil engineering at the University of California at Berkeley and a former New Orleans resident who served as a member of the National Science Foundation panel that studied the city's levees.

This is what happens when societies want to be cheap. When I lived in Tucson, Arizona, we had a typical house in a suburb for a while. Each time it rained very hard, the flood waters would flow straight through the walls and into the house and we would have to shove it back out again using big brooms. This happened in Scotsdale, too.

Indeed, I noticed most houses there, virtually without exception, are built on the flat ground. Barely 6" off the ground. Older Victorian houses were all built like they were in the Northeast: with either a basement or at least raised three or more steps off the ground! They never flooded.

I think it is very peculiar to live with the danger of floods always around the corner. Whole subdivisions are being built south of Las Vegas on a well-known flood plain that doesn't flood daily, just once very 20 years or so. But you can bet, every blasted house will be 6" off the ground! Out west, long timers like my own family, talk about the 20 year floods, the 50 year floods and the dreaded 100 year floods. I have watched large buildings collapse into raging waters in Arizona during big floods. It is easy to spot a flood plain our here. Yet people ignore this totally when building.

New Orleans is subsiding. This means the land is dropping. Geological forces at work means changing the way we interact there and we don't want to take that into account just like the madcap building spree along the coasts of Florida are completely irresponsible and insane.

MIAMI — Frustrated with people and politicians who refuse to listen or learn, National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield ends his 34-year government career today in search of a new platform for getting out his unwelcome message: Hurricane Katrina was nothing compared with the big one yet to come.

Mayfield, 58, leaves his high-profile job with the National Weather Service more convinced than ever that U.S. residents of the Southeast are risking unprecedented tragedy by continuing to build vulnerable homes in the tropical storm zone and failing to plan escape routes.

He pointed to southern Florida's 7 million coastal residents.

"We're eventually going to get a strong enough storm in a densely populated area to have a major disaster," he said. "I know people don't want to hear this, and I'm generally a very positive person, but we're setting ourselves up for this major disaster."

Two people were killed by tornadoes in Louisiana this morning. The lack of shelter for tornadoes is part of the la-de-dah nature of the South. I have a tornado shelter and there are not supposed to be tornadoes in the mountains here but we have had them and will have more thanks to global warming. One tornado went right over my roof, it destroyed homes earlier in its path. I am not wealthy, it is just when I had a choice about buying stuff, I bought the materials to build a secure shelter rather than buy a flat screen TV, for example.

This lack of interest in building things for possible future events extends to all levels today. In the fifties, I remember people building bomb shelters. Today, one almost never sees this despite the fact that the USA is on a major war mongering binge and has been successfully attacked already and proven feeble in defense. One would imagine, people would be frantically building shelters under present circumstances.

LAS ANIMAS, Colo. - As a column of National Guard trucks rolled up to Billy Jack Hawkins' home on the plains, the 57-year-old rancher stomped his boots in the snow and marveled at the blizzard it had taken the troops more than four hours to dig through.

"It's a bad one," the bearded Hawkins said of the snowstorm that buried his ranch and his only way back to town — 20 miles up the road — for six days. "We were locked in. No way out."

Hundreds of National Guard members this week joined local and state officials spread across southeastern Colorado hunting for stranded ranchers and their multibillion-dollar herds of cattle.

Three feet of snow? This is NORMAL here! We don't have it right now but I anticipated the possibility and prepared for it way back during the summer: smart farmers prepare ahead for all weather possibilities. Ranchers know damn well, the West gets blizzards! If they are too dumb to know this, they should read 'Little House on the Prarie' and voila! Stories about blizzards abound!

Ranchers out west compete with farmers up my way. They get cheap land and lots of government handouts like water projects. If I want water, I have to pay someone to drill me a well. When it snows, I have to plow it myself. So I own not one but two snowplows. When my snowplow breaks like it did one year with lots and lots of blizzards, I had to abandon it in the middle of the road and climb up and down my mountain the rest of the winter, hauling things in a sled pulled by the dog! No one came to 'rescue' me. It wasn't even possible to ask.

Our town spends a lot of money on snowplows. We presume we will have harsh winters. So we have to put aside money for it. We don't ignore it if we have three or four nice winters like this one. We know we will get hammered some day so we think ahead. Goofy people in the west love to puff their chests out and claim they are against big government while the east coast is all about the nanny state yet the minute some snow falls, off run the Mr. Big Shot Ranchers to beg for rescue! Gah.

My cows had shelter in winter. All farmers out here have things called 'barns' that cost money to build and repair and run. During severe storms and cold, our cattle go into these 'barns' which seem to barely exist out west. There, they just leave the beasts outside, hot or cold, not matter what, which is why those right wingers are now pleading for people to drop hay from government helicopters to feed the poor things! The nifty thing about barns is, the hay is hauled upstairs which requires a certain amount of labor, and then, during blizzards, etc, is dropped down to where the cows and horses are and they eat it. The farmer, unlike a rancher, lives very close to these barn-thingies and can walk over easily. In the Black Forest of Germany, they have the barns be the lower story of the house and the farmer doesn't bother going outside at all in order to attend to the animals.

So here we have the National Guard fetching hay for a bunch of no-good ranchers who are completely careless about the inevitability of blizzards happening in places where they have happened in the past. No one brought me hay even when I had to climb the mountain one winter due to deep snow and no snowplow. I had sheep back then, no horses or oxen. And had to drag up bales of hay by hand. Ouch.

This is why all the huffing and puffing about how weak easterners are and how manly westerners are pisses me off. I lived in both places. And the grasshopper-mentality of westerners pisses me off. This is probably why I like living in the northeast: you can't ignore reality and people here are much more independent and self-sufficient. Even with good electrical service up here, many of us strive for energy independence. In the article above, one rancher wonders if he should have a generator!

I have had one for years. Ranchers out west only have electricity because the government subsidized the power lines going to them! All around, they are coddled and cared for to the point that they don't bother to try surviving on their own at all. Across the west, people build houses without good foundations that are above even minor flood levels, they don't build storm shelters, nor do they bother with building barns for their poor livestock.

This is ridiculous. When the inevitable California earthquake damages huge swaths of that place, you can bet, they will be knocking at my door, demanding I save them too. All I ask is, they all please refrain from voting for right wingers who talk about how independent and manly they are. If they want me to nanny them, they must be nice to me.

This is why we have a Federal government: to use the power of the whole nation to make life easier for all individuals within. This includes inner cities and the northeast. We all need a nanny at some point in time.

Across the planet, we see the same process at work: all humans are pouring into a few mega-cities. This year, we reached the half-way point in this fatal process. This is a sign of overpopulation, habitat degradation or dying empires with the populations flowing into the capital because the countryside is dangerous. This historic force is another reason to fear a future war: annihilating populations concentrated in cities is how nature deals with overpopulation.

Humanity is about to undertake the greatest change of habitat in its entire history. Authoritative international reports to be published over the next months will show that, for the first time, we will soon be a predominantly urban species, with more people living in towns and cities than in the countryside.

Official United Nations figures show that the world's urban population has more than quadrupled over the past 50 years. Almost half of us inhabit towns and cities: within a quarter of a century 60 per cent of us will do so.

There are two tiers of city-building going on here: the First World cities are dead in the center but extend across many miles of countryside thanks to cheap energy and private transportation. In places like the USA where private transportation has been kept deliberately cheap, whole sectors are actually one giant megalopolis that stretches from the imperial capitol of Washington, DC, all the way to Boston, Massachusetts. One can easily see these mega-metropolises from space at night for they light up the countryside. The Los Angeles area is another giant structure. Since poor people use public transportation and since older buildings are usually inferior to newer ones, the American middle class tends to live as far as possible to cut land costs and provide privacy and to barricade themselves from the slums where crime lurks.

The only real exception to this spreading out is New York City which has more an Asian look to it: namely, the center of the city is the most expensive and the slums are in the more distant older suburbs. This means the center is vibrant and has a lot of money invested in it and the outer perimeters are poorer and more diffuse.

The other force at work in the First World nations is the rush to the seas. As the oceans are cleaned of pollution, beaches have become prime property. I remember when the NYC harbor literally stank like a skunk in summertime. Human waste poured into it and it was truly disgusting to even look at it, much less swim in that cesspool.

Third world nations are more like NYC 75 years ago. Pollution pours into all the rivers and into the sea, as the slums explode across the land, the land degrades rapidly. In the past, there was an upper limit to this sort of overcrowding: disease. Regular epidemics swept the cities and sometimes up to 50% of the population would die such as in the Black Death plague of 1346 in Europe, for example.

Nigeria produces over 2 million barrels of oil a day (currently valued at roughly $40 billion per year) which accounts for 90% of its export earnings and 80% of government revenue. Nigeria also supplies 9% of US imports and is the pillar in the US post 9/11 African oil strategy of the Bush administration which anticipates that the Gulf of Guinea will provide perhaps 25% of US imports by 2015. A multi-billion dollar oil industry is however a mixed blessing at best, and for most Nigerians nothing more than a fairy tail gone awfully wrong. To inventory the 'achievements' of Nigerian oil development is a salutary exercise: 85 percent of oil revenues accrue to 1 percent of the population; over three decades perhaps one quarter of $400 billion in oil; revenues have simply disappeared; between 1970 and 2000 in Nigeria, the number of people subsisting on less than one dollar a day grew from 36 percent to more than 70 percent, from 19 million to a staggering 90 million. According to the International Monetary Fund, oil 'did not seem to add to the standard of living' and 'could have contributed to a decline in the standard of living'. The anti-corruption chief Nuhu Ribadu (one of the few bright lights on a dark political landscape), claimed that in 2003 70% of the country's oil wealth was stolen or wasted; by 2005 it was 'only' 40%. Over the period 1965-2004, the per capital income fell from $250 to $212 while income distribution deteriorated markedly. Since 1990 GDP per capita and life expectancy have, according to World Bank estimates, both fallen. This isn't pretty.

Venezuela has similar problems: high crime, the population in the countryside streaming into makeshift slums, attempts at coping with all this is pushing the government to the limit. In Nigeria, there is little attempt at doing anything, it is swiftly becoming Haiti.

Haiti is a totally degraded environment and nearly everyone now congregates in the vast slums, the difference between slum and countryside nearly wiped out as the land is systematically stripped of everything. Even as modern medicine prevents many epidemics, Mother Nature has stepped in and using Haiti as a home base, she has launched her latest attack on humans: sexual diseases that spread easily but kill slow enough to allow the host body to infect as many people as possible.

The success of civilization in China has meant it has been the host of more than one epidemic. Even if a disease comes in from the countryside via immigration into slums, passing germs in a low-density environment is difficult, in a city, a lark. Simple flu viruses get launched in cities which quickly pass them to other cities via trade. Just like AIDS probably started in Africa, it traveled to Haiti and then literally flew into New York City and when the carrier had sex with just two ballet dancers, it spread like wildfire soon after that...I knew one of the very first victims and his startling and unexpected death from a rapid moving cancer.

The point here is, the rapid transmission of this deadly plague would not have happened if it weren't for large city populations. This was just barely 20 years ago and now AIDS has circumnavigated the entire planet and is now ravaging the mega-slums in Africa as well as Asia. We don't know the level of transmission in many Islamic lands yet but it will spread there, too, just by the mere fact that mega-slums are growing in these lands just as it is across the entire planet. Sexual diseases are particularly hard to suppress because they nearly universally cause the infected person to desire reckless sexual encounters.

These diseases spread as they are 'contained' if doctors find no vaccines for them like with smallpox, for example. This is why so many fear the appearance of the bird flu, if it becomes epidemic, for example. On isolated farms, it would flare and then flame out. But in a mega-slum, it would spread like wildfire. Across Africa, for example, as well as other lands, men are abandoning women and children because the mega-slum shelters everyone sufficiently they can multiply without building a village-society, each is 'alone' within the teeming hordes, there is no negotiations of influence and family responsibilities between clans. This leads to even more degradation and ill health and poverty as we see even in our own mega-cities.

The Shimizu TRY 2004 Mega-City Pyramid is a proposed project for construction of a massive pyramid over Tokyo Bay in Japan. The structure would be 12 times higher than the Great Pyramid at Giza, and would house 750,000 people. If built, it will be the largest man-made structure on Earth. The structure would be 2,004 meters (6,575 feet) high and would answer Tokyo's increasing lack of space.

Japan essentially has only one city and it sprawls across a large landscape, several cities having merged just like on the East Coast of the USA. The population of Japan is one third that of the USA and it is all concentrated in a much, much smaller area. And within this area, vast sections are being systematically depopulated as everyone moves to the capitol. Most First World cities are not stressed out like mega-cities in third world countries due to the entire population ceasing to reproduce anywhere near the rate of replacement. In the USA as well as much of Europe, immigration from African, South American or Central American peasants is populating potential slums which makes these cities look more like the overflowing cities of the Third World.

Japan has made this nearly impossible. There is some inflow of foreign population but mostly, the country is now retracting and consolidating: even as people retire, unlike in America or Europe, instead of moving to the countryside, this is actually increasing the movement to the mega-city.

To Mumford, "the city was primarily a storehouse, a conservator and accumulator" and "by its command of these functions . . . the city served its ultimate function, that of transformer." Mumford’s container imagery is flexible, and is equally applicable to physical aspects of urban design and to other nontangible characteristics, including influential ideas. The city’s role as container of "storable symbolic forms" has coincided historically with its function "as a self-contained" entity. "Glyphs, ideograms, and script," along with "abstractions of number and verbal signs," contribute to the pliable notion of city as container (City in History 97).

Associated with the container metaphor is the notion of the urban power "implosion." As civilization progressed, asserts Mumford, "the many diverse elements of the community hitherto scattered . . . were packed together under pressure, behind the massive walls of the city." The chief, the king, or a comparable leader played a major role in this urban development. "Under pressure of one master institution, that of kingship, a multitude of diverse social particles, long separate and self-centered, if not mutually antagonistic, were brought together in a concentrated urban area." This mutually-reinforcing combination of king and container helped to produce a reaction that could not have occurred, according to Mumford, had there been no implosion. Living in close quarters had its advantages. "As with a gas, the very pressure of the molecules within that limited space produced more social collisions and interactions within a generation than would have occurred in many centuries if still isolated in their native habitats, without boundaries" (City in History 34).

From the very beginning, cities pulled in population from the surrounding countryside. The many daily advantages of living in a city are very great. But whenever a city takes over the countryside, the civilization collapses quite thoroughly such as ancient Rome which became a fat goose rather than a strong entity, when barbarians poured across the denatured landscape. Constantinople grew bigger and bigger as it rotted internally and externally sucked the surrounding countryside dry, eventually it was unable to defend itself without a surrounding empire big enough to literally 'feed' the teeming mobs penned up within.

We have no record of the last days of Rome. The cultural collapse as the place became a mega-slum, was so total, there really wasn't anyone capable of writing about events as they unfolded. The mega-city of Alexandria was burned down and the population slaughtered, too.

"To achieve significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers By 2020" -Target 11 of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) -seems like a formidable task. However, for a group of experts on urban issues, this goal is not high enough. In 2002, Secretary-General Kofi Annan called upon development experts from around the world to develop concrete action plans to achieve the MDGs. Columbia University professor Elliott Sclar co-chaired Task Force 8, which was charged with Target 11.

Dr. Sclar and his team introduced a blueprint to not only achieve the goal of improving the lives of 100 million slum dwellers, but also provide infrastructure, services and alternative housing to an additional 570 million people who would otherwise become slum dwellers by 2020. The report says that financing for these improvements could come from national and local governments in developing countries (55 per cent), the international donor community (35 per cent) and slum and low-income urban dwellers themselves (10 per cent). It also provides success stories from cities in the developing world, including Porto Alegre, Brazil, Amhara, Ethiopia and Tirana, Albania.

First off: Target 11? Whenever I see magic numbers attached to things like this (New World Order-type stuff) my alarm bells ring. The ruling elites are going to fix the slums with what? Money? I seem to recall what that means in America: we are seeing it in New Orleans. Displacing the poor and recovering the slums by sometimes very violent methods. Attempts at bringing better health services only makes the ultimate problem worse if there is no great social change. Redistributing income via revolution or war has been the classic solution to these sorts of problems. The looting of Rome caused it to cease being a mega-slum, for example. The Mongol invasion of China cleared out many cities. Indeed, they literally eliminated a host of major cities across Asia and into the Middle East as well as parts of Europe, stopping at the Nile in Africa and Vienna in Europe.

For all their technological infrastructure and complexity, cities remain, above all, great concentrations of human energy and resourcefulness. Indeed, Eric Jones, an economic historian, has argued that the rise of the West since the Middle Ages can be explained in part by the ease with which Western societies have recovered from disaster, as compared with African and Asian societies. Yet the myth of terrible urban vulnerability endures.

It is worth noting that contemporary prognostication about the effects of limited nuclear war resemble earlier predictions for air raids: both assume that the destruction of cities would come early in a conflict, that a relatively small number of warheads or bombs would spread destruction over a large area, and that such a level of destruction would cripple an enemy’s economic and social systems. Obviously, nuclear war is a new kind of war, of a new order of magnitude. But given that fact, is it possible that we have simply updated our old assumptions about the importance of technological infrastructures in cities to keep pace with the nuclear age?

Josef W. Konvitz, a professor of history at Michigan State University, is the author of The Urban Millennium: The City-Building Process from the Early Middle Ages to the Present (Southern Illinois University, 1985).

Wars have destroyed many cities. Some are rebuilt again and again but many eventually literally disappear from the map which is why looking at only one or two wars is meaningless. Troy was rebuilt a dozen times and then it died completely. Knossos was destroyed by a volcanic tsunami and never rebuilt. Rome rose, fell and only rose again after over 1,000 years and this due only to the fact a major religion made Rome its headquarters.

Paris and London have been destroyed and rebuilt. Both are capitals of their kingdoms. Berlin is a newish city, same age as New York City, actually. It was not touched much until WWII. It remained an important city purely by accident: four empires divided it into four parts and then fought over this division for 50 years.

Now Berlin could reassert its power as a capitol thanks to this historic accident.

Nuclear wars aren't like regular bombings. Cities swell with refugees fleeing the countryside if there is an invasion. Then the cities are bombed and many die. Cities are then rebuilt and filled again from the endless wombs of the countryside. But the people in cities usually die in major wars. In a nuclear war that drops multiple hydrogen bombs on all the mega-cities in the First World, there will be virtually no way to rebuild except on the time scale of the Dark Ages: a thousand years or more will pass before anything big rises from the ashes.

The explosive growth of the mega-slums can lead to a catastrophic war. Wars are all about 'Lebensraum'---room to live. The horrors of Darfur are the same thing: the countryside is being destroyed by mobs of people herding animals, seeking water and food while others attempt to farm on marginal lands. Meanwhile, factory farming, the 'green revolution' is feeding ever more people while driving peasants and subsistence farmers off their lands, driving them into the bulging slums climbing steep mountainsides and across mudflats.

This isn't a local problem, it is an epidemic that seems endemic to being human. Just as we gather together digitally on the internet, we are physically flowing towards various galactic monsters, the great Metropolis. This Mega Metropolis is an inviting target. It is also inherently unstable. This is why nuclear disarmament should be a very powerful force within our own vulnerable lands.

Instead of building for the future, architects and their clients build fantasy concoctions that will be nearly impossibly expensive to operate when the Hubbert's oil peak causes huge hikes in energy costs. In addition, these buildings are disfunctional with a great deal of wasted space and often ugly expressions of modern will. The desire to 'make a statement' often means screaming, 'we are totally nuts.'

Homes which are more eco-friendly homes will be built under radical reforms of house-building regulations as part of the Government's efforts to tackle climate change and create more affordable housing.

The Housing minister, Yvette Cooper, is preparing a major announcement next month which could herald a change in the type of houses that are traditionally built in Britain. For the first time, planning regulations are to be set down requiring planners and builders to take account of climate change.

Tough new planning guidance will require large housing estates to be sustainable, with district heating schemes where possible, water recycling and use of renewable resources. In the long-term, their construction will required to be carbon neutral. A second set of planning guidelines will require higher standards of insulation, soundproofing and energy-saving designs.

If one reads old magazines from the seventies, Europe and America, spoiled by living graciously thanks to cheap energy, were now motivated to design buildings that were energy efficient and impervious to the vagaries of oil prices and availability. Barely had some communities passed laws concerning how much insulation goes into a roof, etc, when the price of oil fell and the availability of natural gas shot up, thanks to Russia selling gas to Europe and Canada selling gas to the USA. The urgency to change collapsed and everyone celebrated this by building McValhallas all over the place.

Public buildings, instead of being well-made machines for public use, exploded into all sorts of silly, bizarre and totally inappropriate ways. Making things big and bigger was the ruling impules. Art museums in the Victorian era, for example, were crammed with art. Five or six paintings hung one above the other on walls. The first showcase building that didn't do this was the famous 'Crystal Palace' in England. It was an industrial wonder, created to celebrate the invention of using steel members to make airy, open interior spaces. It was a most amazing achievement.

It also burned down.

The passion for building greenhouses using this new technology swept Victorian society. The new bathroom plumbing and central heating followed. Cities passed laws forcing the building of new technology and the cities went from being fetid, dirty places into clean, pleasant places to live. The city nearest to my farm is Troy, New York.

The genius of Victorian builders is so beautifully expressed there, many film makers use our local city as a film set. Click on image to enlarge

These are views of Russell Sage College which is a very beautiful campus set in the heart of the Troy brownstone district. New York City has extensive brownstone neighborhoods and back in the mid 1970's, I and a host of ecologically sensitive builders moved to these communities and rebuilt them.

Automobiles and the fear of nuclear war and fear of minorities caused these neighborhoods to slide into slums. There is little parking which can be annoying but thanks to the system of public transportation built by Vicctorians, this really isn't a problem. The shared walls meant no heat loss from the long axis of the buildings. In summer, these houses had awnings to keep out the sun and if one plants trees in front and back, they shelter the houses from the city's heat. We planted many, many trees. I belonged to such an organization. And all these neighborhoods have beautiful, stunning Victorian parks to clean the air and enjoy life on pleasant days. A triumph in civilization.

Thrown away as Americans retreated from doomed cities. The idea that cities are doomed is deep within our souls, put there by nuclear war. As one website worried about war said, 'To survive, stay away from cities!' The Japanese and Europeans are now accustomed to being bombed in their cities and they simply rebuild. Of course, once we reach the Hubbert oil peak, this becomes a much more difficult proposition. It is really odd that America, whose cities haven't been bombed, is more paranoid about living in cities. I suspect the populations of Europe think the coming nuclear war won't touch them and only hammer the USA and Russia? Perhaps.

The Japanese are simply fatalists. They will fight heroically but also commit suicide easily. A principal in a school recently in Japan made an error on what classes the students were supposed to take so he committed suicide!

In a way, due to our own refusal to understand cities and how to live despite the lovely solutions the Victorians came up with, we continue to desire giganticism and glory. The standard height of buildings in Victorian communities is five stories. Paris is built on this scale. The towers that ring Paris are slums built to hold the masses at bay but the well-heeled prefer the older communities built so joyously in the city's center.

In Troy, there is another major educational institution: Rensselear Institute (RPI). It was one of the earliest technical institutes in the world and many engineers and builders were trained there. The sprawling campus climbs the steep hillside that rises to Mount Ida. The campus is as steep as my mountain and the buildings rise one over the other. During the last stockmarket surge, RPI got several huge bequests and went on a building spree.

Hubris raised its ugly head and they chose a plan for a media center building that is not only utterly impractical but ugly as hell. The front facade facing the rest of Troy downhill is a bizarre thingie that looks like someone's rear end got trapped in a box. It serves no real functional purpose except to look like an ass.

Drawings for the experimental media and performing arts center have been submitted to the Troy Planning Commission for site plan approval. The new center will extend the Institute's distinctive position in electronic arts and communication and enhance traditional and classical performing arts. It is expected to open in 2006.

As part of the overall south campus project, Rensselaer is making improvements to College Avenue. Work to the upper portion of the street — including sidewalks, curbs, utilities, and landscaping — has been completed. Work continues on the lower portion of the street, with completion scheduled for early November. Work on the chiller plant, located behind the parking garage, and boiler plant, near the Service Building, continues on schedule. Other infrastructure improvements to campus utilities will continue through the fall.

“We are building for the future as we continue working to meet the goals of The Rensselaer Plan,” said Amr Abdel-Azim, senior executive for capital projects. “It’s very exciting to see the transformation that’s taking place as the Institute continues its progress toward becoming a leading 21st century technological university.”

HAHAHAHA. It is 2006 and the work on the interior has barely been started this week! A two year behind the schedule is a serious problem. Two years over budget, too. The builders pretended to know what they were doing. When they drilled into the hillside to see if they could put a building there, I assumed they were sane and would build something useful there.

Last year's picture. Instead, to show caprice and hubris, the architect made this stupid thing in the front of what is basically a boring, slick surfaced box! DOWNHILL. To the weight of the building is in the front and this drags the rest of the building downhill.

Here is my own picture of this stupid thingie taken this week. I was standing on the street below. The structure is still open to the air, they have to cover it with glass eventually, I am assuming. The tall glass atrium can be seen on either side.

They drove deep pilings into the earth when they started construction. I wandered by and shook my head. The hills around Troy are clay and prone to collapse. In the Victorian era, a whole neighborhood was obliverated by a mudslide during a storm. This was not very far from where the new building is going up. I have recently built a house on a mountainside. It takes skill and care to anchor the building properly and landscape the mountainside so it is safe from mudslides. To see this fail, one simply has to visit California where some of the dumbest hillside building projects exist.

One reader of this blog chastized me for critisizing the anchoring of many mega-buildings. I often tell people, 'the foundation is more important than any part of a building.' This was recognized by Jesus, a man who grew up building stuff: do not build your house on sand. The RPI structure immediately, when they stopped building the box part and began work on the very heavy steel superstructure, began to slide downhill.This picture was taken standing on the flatlands below the hillside where RPI sits. Most of the buildings on this hillside are Victorian brick structures.

RPI has a hammer lock on the local media so no one (except for me, I guess) is reporting on this mess. I heard from others on campus rumors of technical problems. They evidently had to use some really awesome interior turnbuckle and anchoring systems to tie it into the hillside. In other words, they are fighting not only nature but gravity itself. When one builds, it is really better to cooperate with those two fierce forces.

Dramatically increased energy costs have burdened families, businesses, and institutions across the country in the last year. Rensselaer is no exception. We are projecting an overrun of $4.1 million over the amount budgeted for energy costs this year, for a total of nearly $13 million. To reduce costs, we have instituted an energy-reduction plan, which sets guidelines for energy conservation on our campuses. In addition, we are reviewing buildings and programs, and instituting new airflow and energy systems, to reduce usage and costs. The plan could yield up to $1 million in savings over the next year. To make this work, we need your help, and your participation. I am sure you already are taking steps in your homes to conserve energy. I encourage you to bring that same approach and mindset to your work and living spaces on our campuses. The Division of Administration has produced a very helpful pamphlet with tips and suggestions we all can follow. As an institution, we must be prepared to deal with continuing escalating energy costs, as we also strive for long-term energy security through our research. In fact, I believe our own faculty have much to offer to the Institute in terms of our own energy posture and associated steps here.

*snip*

Construction on EMPAC will continue in FY07. In fact, it will be the decisive year to prepare for the opening of EMPAC. Construction will move to the interior and installation of the program-specific infrastructure.

Even when making a speech to the students, explaining why tuition is shooting up and why everyone is facing a 10% cut in budgets, she can't mention one of the causes: the stupid, venal, ridiculous building mess created by a careless architect who doesn't understand the laws of gravity and of course, the psychotic need to build energy-devouring structures. This building is just such an example.

The main windows that rise several stories, face the west. This means the heat of the summer sun is concentrated on this face of the building and the most ferocious of the winter's winds hit this same face. The glass being used is very green in color, I suppose to deal with this problem, but it is only a half measure. This building is for media projects and when one does that, it is inside closed off rooms. One can't use a computer screen in a brightly lit area, for example.

I can sympathize with the desire to see the lovely landscape, the view from Mt. Ida is really amazing. But the bizarre superstructure is not only ugly but it doesn't enhance the view sufficiently to justify its tremendous cost and the difficulties it created.

When it comes to window placement, it never ceases to amaze me how builders disregard nature. Instead of making houses more efficient and exploiting or preventing the sun from creating energy problems, buildings are blissfully set up in total ignorance to orientation. I know this will stop in another fifty years but the landscape will be littered with buildings that are not economical to live in or use.

Just this week, I have reported about rich Israelis building nuclear bomb shelters. And the USA suddenly announces they are closing the NORAD nuclear war room in Colorado yet we have all our fleet off shore by Iran because we fear nuclear war? Time to review why our leaders have extended their nuclear bomb shelters in DC while telegraphing to the rest of us, there is nothing to worry about except we should be scared to death or else?

CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN AIR FORCE STATION, Colorado (AP) -- Dr. Strangelove would have a heart attack: America's vaunted underground war room deep inside this granite mountain is being retired. Not only that, but Russian military men have been inside the place.

During the long nuclear standoff with Moscow, the nation's super-secret nerve center was a symbol of both Cold War might and apocalyptic dread, depicted in such movies as "WarGames" in 1983.

But with the end of the Cold War, the war room is being put on "warm standby" to save money. A staff will keep it ready to resume operations at a moment's notice if a blast-hardened command center becomes necessary, but the critical work is being shifted to Peterson Air Force Base, about 10 miles away.

Seriously, since 9/11, they have been bellowing at us about Saddam who had no WMD what so ever, was going to nuke us and 'we don't want to find out when a nuclear bomb flashes' was used to terrorize the USA citizens into supporting the now disasterous war in Iraq. We used up every ounce of our diplomatic capital trying to twist arms of many nations that really couldn't believe what they were hearing and even today, we are going about the planet madly twisting arms, screaming about nuclear war and the need to disarm small, nearly helpless nations.

So aside from the obvious need to scare red state voters into voting for sexual predators, the only bomb shelters I see the GOP talking about is the bedroom: the nuclear bomb is two gay guys getting hitched.

The Japanese are understandably leery of being nuked, of course. But even there, I don't see in the news, stories explaining how they must build many nuclear bomb shelters! So whatever fear there is, it isn't translating into action.

The principles of radiation protection are simple - with many options and resources families can use to prepare or improvise a very effective shelter. You must throw off the self-defeating myths of nuclear un-survivability that may needlessly seal the fate of less informed families.

*snip*

What stops radiation, and thus shields your family, is simply putting mass between them and the radiation source. Like police body armor stopping bullets, mass stops (absorbs) radiation. The thicker the mass, the more radiation it stops. Also, the denser (heavier) the mass used, the more effective it is with every inch more you add to your fallout shelter. The thickness in inches needed to cut the radiation down to only 1/10th of its initial intensity for different common materials is: Steel 3.3", concrete 11", earth 16", water 24", wood 38", etc. The thickness required to stop 99% of the radiation is: 5" of steel, 16" of solid brick or hollow concrete blocks filled with mortar or sand, 2 feet of packed earth or 3 feet if loose, 3 feet of water. You may not have enough steel available, but anything you do have will have mass and can be used to add to your shielding - it just takes more thickness of lighter wood, for example, than heavier earth, to absorb and stop the same amount of radiation. Increasing the distance between your family and the radiation outside also reduces the radiation intensity.

All this information assumes one's house isn't set on fire or is blown flat so one can't get out of a basement. Not that many houses outside of the fussy Northeast has anything resembling a basement at all.

In this side view, it shows the lucky survivor huddling under the table, barricaded inside. The house is suspiciously intact overhead so it must be someone about 100 miles away from ground zero.

The government advice is to stay huddled under the table for merely two or three days (um, right). From the end of WWII to the Cuban Missile Crisis, Americans were exhorted to prepare for any sudden nuclear war and many bulletins, movies, school exercises and civil defense drills were encouraged.

Click here to view a film that was made for us kids back then, 'Duck and Cover.' I lived at various times, especially when in Tucson, Arizona, at some pretty big ground zero first targets if the Soviet Union wanted nuclear war. This meant we were exposed to a lot of civil defense training that I found laughable and annoying because it caused nightmares. One of the curiosities of my youth was people I knew including wretched family members who made various bomb shelters in the Rincon mountains, for example, and then kept it secret from their own brothers or sisters.

Whoopee. Try surviving on one's own! Yup. It really puzzled me because I have high survival skills and of all female side of the family, I had the best shooting and sword combat skills not to mention, archery. One would think I would either be welcome or they would have to worry about me hunting them down so I could pig out on the food they hoarded?

Well, it led to such forms of madness as this. Many, many 'survivalists' were worried about sharing their shelters and their goodies (from people like me, I suppose) and so they thought, if they hid everything, no one would beg them for help if a nuclear war broke out. Snug in one's spider hole, one could laugh it up while cousin Eddie turned to cinder or rolled on the ground, screaming and ripping off his burning clothes. Yup.

In a nutshell, this is what our society is devolving into: people praying to Jesus to fry one's sister to death because she loves Pegasus and not some creepy death god. And millions of Americans pray for nuclear war.

Which takes me back to the bizarre headlines: why is the government telling the men and women protecting America (HAHAHA---like on 9/11) there is really no danger and they can relax and stand down? Like when Bush got the memo, 'Bin Laden Determined To Attack in USA', Bush stayed on vacation and even while under attack, he and Rummy didn't show even slight energy or interest.

The legions of Christians praying for nuclear war aren't getting ready for it because a certain insanity has entered our public domain and looking at the 'Duck and Cover' movie shows the roots of this insanity. It is assumed the children and adults would assist each other but they all had to be super-paranoid that a nuke was going to hit at any time! I could see as clear as day that if there was a nuke dropped on Tucson, if I had no gun or other weapon at hand, I would be killed...by my neighbors, my own family, anyone scared that I would eat their food or drink their stored water.

So a brutal rush to eliminate fellow citizens and family members would be the result, not kindly men assisting school children into group shelters. This Cowardly New World really disturbed me as a child. It didn't make me very happy, actually. Indeed, it pissed me off so much, I became an advocate for disarming all nukes so I wouldn't have to worry about shooting my own sisters dead if we had to see who gets the bomb shelter's supplies.

Actually, an amazing number of people ignored all this. They chose to live in fantasyland and even when my father was flying in and out of DC while advising President Kennedy or President Eisenhower on whether or not to launch nukes, most of my playmates were blissfully clueless because our government kept their families ignorant of the real danger.

Indeed, I was supposed to play dumb with them because otherwise they might try to sneak into our bomb shelter, too and we would have to kill them. Back to that dark, antisocial core of Shadowlands. My father grew very angry with me during the sixties as I fought our government over these issues. He felt these bombs protected America even as our family didn't really want to save anyone. Namely, no one in the government was telling the truth about nuclear war even as they gamed the system for themselves.

It is worse today for we are supposed to support gamesmanship that is quite nuclear warish while at the same time our leaders are frantically building bomb shelters or distant hide-a-ways like in Paraguay and they are telling us to redecorate the kitchen and go to Disney World.

This is bad, for they are the likely first target in any war scenario. Today, China has managed to lure North Korea back into the stalled six party talks. China knows the USA will torpedo anything China offers and so they are prepared to illustrate to all of Asia, the USA is a rogue state that must be shunned. We think the negotiations will occur because everyone is mad at North Korea.

This is false.

Which takes me back to the curious news that we don't need to protect NORAD anymore. Now, NORAD sits in a building even more vulnerable than the Pentagon which was attacked by a mere passenger plane! Does this make any sense at all?

Um, looks like the new location for NORAD is going to go 'poof'. Of course, the Pentagon claims they will rush to their old bomb shelter if they must. But again, on 9/11, they didn't even walk, much less, rush, to anything. They sat there, dumbfounded! For over an hour!

And everyone who runs nuclear war games (Russia and China) saw clearly how motivated and protective our military really is, which is, barely at all. Snoring away like just as the attack on Pearl Harbor. Sitting ducks. Quack.

Midway, this clip shows actual victims of the nuclear bomb attack. The actual footage of the victims of our nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima clearly shows people stunned by the attack, everything utterly destroyed and little children wailing in pain, dying, women clutching each other, trying to struggle forwards, everything breaking down yet families trying to cling to each other, little children desperately carrying even younger siblings out of danger.

Heartbreaking. And seldom seen in America. We don't want to know the grim reality of nuclear war because, frankly, we like the notion of bombing people until they surrender!

FROELICH: Benjamin's family is originally from the Marshall Island's Bikini Atoll, where in 1954 the United States conducted its biggest test, a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb. The operation, code-named Bravo, was one of many detonated on Bikini, as well as Enewetak Atoll. The explosion was equivalent to a thousand Hiroshima-sized bombs, and pulverized large portions of coral reef, irradiating the land and sea.

The U.S. Navy, along with Atomic Energy Commission personnel, evacuated people, including Benjamin's family, from test sites like Bikini before the tests. They were allowed to go back twenty years later. But then it was determined that drinking water on Bikini was still too radioactive, so, six years after that, islanders had to leave once again. In the meantime, some may have received a dose.

BENJAMIN: Right now, I have a lot aunties, and also uncles, they died. They had the sicknesses with them until their body cannot fight it anymore. I got two this year, they passed away. My sister also passed away last year because of cancers.

FROELICH: The testing continued for more than a decade. Islanders on nearby atolls often were not evacuated during the tests. They were deemed to be at a safe distance.

Our military bombed those islands over and over again and the people are still paying for this not to mention, all of us. The whole planet is seeing a huge hike in cancers thanks to all the nuclear bombs dropped during the Cold War and by far, most of these bombs were American.

By ROBERT TRUMBULL, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES
The residents of Enewetak atoll in the Marshall Islands have filed a lawsuit against the Federal Government for $500 million in damages, accusing the United States of neglect and broken promises after they were evacuated from their homeland in 1947 so that it could be used for a long series of nuclear weapons tests, In the complaint, entered in the United States Claims Court in Washington, the Enewetakese say that when they returned to their property two years ago they found that five of the atoll's 40 or so islets had been completely destroyed, among other lasting damage. Several other islands on which they once lived have been put off limits by United States scientists because of lingering radioactivity in the soil. The major island of Runit has been converted into a repository for contaminated debris from the tests and covered with a concrete cap 370 feet in diameter and 18 inches thick. The scientists say the debris will be radioactive for at least the next 240,000 years, according to the complaint.
October 17, 1982

To this day, many Americans have a pretty brutal attitude about Hiroshima. They have been fooled into thinking victory at this price, is well worth it. For us to be secure, we should feel free to nuke civilian populations. This ethos conflicts with our own rage when our own civilians are attacked. The dual justice whereby we can use whatever tools of power we wish while others must hold back or be disarmed, lies at the core of our present troubles. Namely, no one is taking us seriously except insofar we are acting insane and they fear we might unleash terrible weapons upon the Iraqis or Iranians, for example.

MOSCOW, Oct. 31 (Xinhua) -- Russia has no information indicating Iran's nuclear program is for military purposes but Tehran should act quickly to clarify lingering questions about its nuclear work, a top official said on Tuesday.

BEIJING, Oct. 31 (Xinhua) -- China holds that all parties concerned should refrain from taking any action that may lead to the escalation of the situation on Iran nuclear issue, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said here Tuesday.

Liu said some new situation emerged in Iran nuclear issue, and China will continue to consult with other members of UN Security Council on relevant issues.

This is why Russia and China have loudly warned us to not do this. Tension between the world's Great Powers isn't peaceful at all, it is very dangerously elevated this year. So...why are they taking NORAD out of their secure location? Hmmm?

Part II of the Madness of Builders: Der Ring Die Nibelungen is the perfect metaphor for the Autumn days of the once mighty American Empire. It shows us how the New World Order won't be us in charge but rather, an overthrowing of the present system.

This epic opera remains to this day, a giant edifice within the world of opera. It, like the storyline’s protaganist, Wotan, is over ambitious and willfully powerful and like within itself, the hubris that brings destruction down upon Valhalla and Wotan mirrored the same forces that destroyed Hitler and Germany.

HItler loved this opera above all others. The Wagner family had this opera performed at Bayrueth at frequent intervals. This town’s main business was to host Wagner’s operas every summer. Wagner’s second wife, a woman very much like Frika, Wotan’s imperious wife in the opera, hosted parties for Hitler and was an ardent anti-semite like her husband.

The opera opens with the cavorting Rhine maidens teasing a rapacious dwarf, Alberich. They are guardians of the Rhinegold, the magic of sex and power. This power flows from the sun and from internal energy produced by organic matter as well as water flowing. Tying this together is sexual energy.

The dwarf, in retaliation to the relentless playful teasing of the Rhine Maidens, steals this power and turns the raw energy into a system that gives power to whoever holds it. The potent power of energy harnessed by machines made from material dug out of the earth is the underlying force in this interesting opera.The potent power overwhelms the mind of the dwarf wielding it and he becomes brutal and oppressive as he protects himself emotionally by abusing the wealth this energy showers upon him. In Norse mythology, he uses this power to seduce the goddesses as well as queens who prostitute themselves to him for a share of this wealth and power.

Wotan knows his life isn’t eternal but to protect himself and his family of gods, he decides to build Valhalla, a major construction project that only the Giants can do. To pay for the Giants, he needs funds and to get these funds, he needs to steal it from the dwarf.

Using trickery, he succeeds. The dwarf curses him and the Ring of Power. After this point, all the tricks and strategems of Wotan only make things worse and worse as he struggles to reconcile his original crime with his desire for total security and eternal life.

The Zeitgeist of Germany when this opera was written was very upbeat. Under the astute leadership of Bismark, one of history’s infrequent geniuses in statecraft and war, the Second Empire was built on the fractured ruins of the previous Holy Roman Empire that rotted and collapsed in the religious fratricidal wars that wracked Europe from 1500 onwards. New flags flapped in the wind and the wind was blowing for Germany. Brimming with the released energy of the German people who suddenly saw all barriers collapse and a new sense of nationalism and unity swept the populace, all the fruits of the Romantic Movement were suddenly concentrated in Germany.

The new empire swept into war and overthrew the French Empire, forcing the heir of Napoleon to flee. As Germany strengthened its own state, France had another revolution and reaction which made France look weaker than Germany. The mature British Empire was the only power standing in the way of Germany’s expansion.

In this heady mix, Wagner wrote an opera that clearly showed the dire results of all this. Precient and unprecedented, it dared to show not just the end of power in Germany but nuclear war. The power elite as well as the dwarves and giants on earth, were swept away in a massive fire/flood. This dark vision of the future was hidden by the garb of Dark Age mythology. But the story makes it clear: the hubris of the ruling elites desiring total security and complete power dooms them to destruction for their own actions insure their own defeats.

All great powers that try to freeze everything in place end up conspiring to commit crimes, murder and mayhem in this Quixotic quest and thus, create what they fear.

Germantic romantic culture has spread throughout our own culture for it is very compelling as well as frightful. Just like the rich burden of Italian culture or French sensibilities overwhelms anyone who tries to digest it all, these powerful forces shape our view of the universe quite literally in Einstein’s case, all the stuff flowing from the former Holy Roman Empire still troubles our sleep and lures us into the same traps that caught Wotan so totally.

The Ring cycle is today by far the most influential opera on stage. Many opera houses count on Wagner Ring cycles for making money in summer just as the Nutcracker Ballet makes money in winter. This mirrors today’s Zeitgeist in America and Europe: a desire to steal energy and live in Valhalla while forcing the Giants and Dwarves, China and all the third world workers and peasants, to toil for us as we sit on our side of the Rainbow Bridge, having sex, eating and drinking merrily. This plan has flaws for the Dwarves are actively fighting back and the Giants are nearly done with their labors and will soon ask for us to honor our IOUs we have handed them as if there is no tomorrow.

Using the power of the Giants and Dwarves, we have built many palaces and giant towers. The biggest industry in America now is selling the labor of the Giants in the form of industrial goods produced in Asia and exploiting the Dwarves, illegal aliens, making them build our McValhallas for a pittance. Like in the Wagner opera, we mainly produce death equipment as our sole industry is now military stuff. To pay for this stuff, we sell weapons all over the planet and then we wail with fear as the world becomes more and more dangerous.

What can equal
your luck, Wotan?
Great your gain
when you won the ring;
still more it profits (benefits) you
now that it is taken(as payment);
for see, your foes
fell (fighting) each other
for the gold that you gave up.

WOTAN

Yet how anxiety weighs upon me!
Dread and fear
are a ball and chain in my mind;
how to end it
Erda must teach me:
I must go down to her (and have sex).

Like in the operas, the Giants fight and then the winner becomes a dragon, Fafnir. This dragon can only be slain by a pure hero but this same person is directly responsible for destroying everyone including himself because he is rash and stupid.

China is aware of the dangers of rash stupidity and they are very wary about Bush and his pseudo-heroism and the American people have followed this coward pretending to be Siegfried and thus, ended up being defeated by tribes of dwarves, the barely armed people in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The dwarf in North Korea was smarter than the other dwarves and has armed himself with a small Ring of Power but it is enough to protect himself from the crazed American AWOL false Siegfried. Siegfried likes to talk about ‘victory’ all the time just like Hitler but victory is eluding him because he has no personal power, he is a feeble shell of a man.

The Dragon curls around the dwarf in North Korea and protects him but it can also crush him if he gives it too much annoyance. The Dragon knows that Siegfried and his Pentagon pals plan to kill it and it is taking many measures to prevent this crime. But all its efforts will be for naught if the rash fake hero feels he has to do the deed. This is why he works so frantically on building Valhalla America: a fortress that is unassailable.

Except it isn’t. And like the operatic painted backdrops lit up like fire as the music thunderously destroys it all, so will America fall to the thunder of thousands of nuclear bombs if we try and fail to take down the Dragon.

Like Germany before WWI and WWII, America is filled with fatalists who think it would be a good thing to have a final confrontation that will seperate the goats and the sheep, the dwarves and giants defeated while the hero dies and all lies in ruins, to be reborn as a New World Order wherein only the innocent and the good remain.

In the opera, it is the cheeky, laughing, sexually active females who are irresponsible and careless who survive.

President Bush has signed a new National Space Policy that rejects future arms-control agreements that might limit U.S. flexibility in space and asserts a right to deny access to space to anyone "hostile to U.S. interests."

The document, the first full revision of overall space policy in 10 years, emphasizes security issues, encourages private enterprise in space, and characterizes the role of U.S. space diplomacy largely in terms of persuading other nations to support U.S. policy.

When writing about all this, one can't help but notice how the grandest of all space operas, the Star Wars epic, is similiar to and based on the Ring of the Nibelungen. And it, too, senses something is very wrong with our future plans for a Valhallian power, our plans for the Dwarves and Giants of the Earth. Lucas doesn't have the depth of Wagner to see the logical conclusion, he has a happy, Nüremberg Rally ending to his saga.

But as time passed and Lucas aged, he fell more and more into the same spell that captured Wagner's mind. His last film was totally dark and the logic of the earlier movies fades in the face of the Dark Force triumphant for the entire culture is dark in the Revenge of the Sith.

The Valkyrie are Yoda and his clique of warriors and Sieglinde is Darth Vader's illicit wife who also bears fatal twins who are doomed to destroy their father. All this was washed out of the Return of the Jedi. I greatly dislike that movie because it isn't serious like the second Star Wars movie that has the true glimpse of the utter despair of the last movie in this long series.

‘Post-modern’ architecture is even worse than ‘modern’ architecture and both are dehumanizing as well as downright dangerous as we saw on 9/11, for example. The invention of elevators as well as other modern building materials has tempted designers to create increasingly bad or dangerous buildings all in the name of hubris.

Winners of the prestigious Stirling prize for architecture, which will be announced tonight, have been lauded by architects but are often beset by faults and loathed by the people who use them, according to one of the government's design advisers.

Last year the judges were widely criticised for selecting the controversial new Scottish parliament building for the top prize in the face of a catalogue of problems that dogged its construction and forced it to go 10 times over budget.

Problems have also occurred at Peckham library, in south London, the winner in 2000. Librarians complain of dinginess inside and the fact that older people are put off from entering because it is on the fourth floor.

Many of the other buildings to scoop the prize have failed to live up to the praise heaped on them. Critics say architects have become detached from everyday life and are calling for a rethink of the prize so that buildings are judged on how well they stand up to use.

Irena Bauman, a Leeds-based architect and one of the government's design advisers, said architects had become seduced by style over substance.

"Even iconic buildings, as Stirling buildings undoubtedly are, suffer from a host of minor defects which is forgivable. However, some of them are inadequate for their purpose. This is embarrassing in buildings receiving the highest architectural accolade in the UK."

Defects? When someone sets out to build something, the chief thing to avoid is any ‘defects.’ The more defects there are, the more a building becomes a danger, a fiscal sink due to excessive repairs and of course, a nightmare to use. Flaws in building design can be fatal. Some designs are made to fail. The most spectacular failure in the history of architecture is the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings.

Modern architecture is suffering from the same cultural euni that afflicts other fine arts. The building of museums leads the pack in crazed, inefficient, impossible to keep in repair buildings. Completely cut off from reality, the architect simply puts together a hodge-podge of planes and inclines and a wild variety of building materials, many of which must be replaced every 20 years or so, and sets everything out of whack so there are few verticals at 90 degrees giving a giddy, irrational explosion. Like the much celebrated and I think, totally irresponsible Getty Museum.

Designed by the North American architect Frank O. Gehry, this unique Museum built on a 32,500 square meter site in the center of Bilbao represents an amazing construction feat. On one side it runs down to the waterside of the Nervión River, 16 meters below the level of the rest of the city of Bilbao. One end is pierced through by the huge Puente de La Salve, one of the main access routes into the city.

As someone who fixes building flaws, it distresses me to see so many ill-concieved projects dominating the news and encouraging even more capricious, bizarre, useless expressions of distain for the laws of physics.

by Christian Chaise Mon Oct 30, 10:46 AM ET
DUBAI (AFP) - Slated to become the world's tallest skyscraper and symbol of a city given to grandiose projects, "Burj Dubai," or Dubai Tower, is rising in parallel with the profits of its promoter, Emaar Properties.

With two stories added every week, Burj Dubai is taking shape as the centerpiece of a 20-billion-dollar venture featuring the construction of a new district, "Downtown Burj Dubai," that will house 30,000 apartments and the world's largest shopping mall.

Launched in early 2004, the construction of the tower by South Korea's Samsung should be completed at the end of 2008 and cost one billion dollars, according to Greg Sang, the Emaar official in charge of Burj Dubai.

Unlike Manhattan, there is no logic in building this thing. In Manhattan, there was never really good logic for the WTC, either. The builders and the rich men directing them said quite openly, they wanted something overwhelmingly big and controversial. Right smack in the center of where wars are brewing like coffee at sunrise.

"After studying more than one hundred schemes in model form, Yamasaki decided on a two-tower development to contain the nine million square feet of office space. One tower became unreasonable in size and unwieldy structurally, yet several towers became too approximate for their size and 'looked too much like a housing project'; whereas two towers gave a reasonable office area on each floor, took advantage of the magnificent views, and allowed a manageable structural system. The twin towers, with 110 floors rising 1,353 feet, ... (are) the tallest in the world. From observation decks at the top of the towers it...(is) possible to see 45 miles in every direction....One distinct advantage of the project's enormity is the architectural opportunity to advance the art of building. Yamasaki re-examined the skyscraper from the first principles, considering no ground so hallowed that it could not be questioned, especially in view of the potential of modern technology. The usual economic prohibition on 'custom-made' was out, as virtually anything made for the Center would automatically become a stock item. 'Economy is not in the sparseness of materials that we use,' said Yamasaki of his $350 million estimated cost, 'but in the advancement of technology, which is the real challenge.'

"The structural system, deriving from the I.B.M. Building in Seattle, is impressively simple. The 208-foot wide facade is, in effect, a prefabricated steel lattice, with columns on 39-inch centers acting as wind bracing to resist all overturning forces; the central core takes only the gravity loads of the building. A very light, economical structure results by keeping the wind bracing in the most efficient place, the outside surface of the building, thus not transferring the forces through the floor membrane to the core, as in most curtain-wall structures. Office spaces will have no interior columns. In the upper floors there is as much as 40,000 square feet of office space per floor. The floor construction is of prefabricated trussed steel, only 33 inches in depth, that spans the full 60 feet to the core, and also acts as a diaphragm to stiffen the outside wall against lateral buckling forces from wind-load pressures.

Gross area of 43200 square feet (4020 square meters) each per floor.

The tremendous weight of all that concrete, steel and glass was vividly displayed when the pilings supporting the outer skin of the building were severed on one side. The insupportable weight plus the raging fires caused the buildings to rapidly collapse. People who don’t know the buildings as intimately as I do, can’t understand the gross size of the place.

Looking at films and photos are no subsitute for understanding the weight bearing loads resting on precious few steel members. In order to make the interior as open as possible, the building was designed with few interior supports that were weight bearing.

Comparing the size of each floor of the WTC with other buildings is like comparing a professonal sports stadium to a school football field. When the WTC was proposed by Rockefeller, an ambitious man, he wanted it to be the final word in mega-pyramid building. Lower Manhattan was flush with money with the stock market going up and up and up.

The giddy feelings this caused allowed people to ignore the blinking red lights. The Empire State Building, for a long time the tallest building in the world, was planned and launched just as the stockmarket hit its greatest highs. Like with the WTC, the Empire State Building was actually built after the market crashed and the potential tenants evaporated along with a massive amount of elusive wealth.

Like the WTC, the Empire State Building was featured in disaster and monster movies. The unease of t his building was mirrored by the WTC. For example, a military plane crashed into it. Suicides used it to the point, a huge fence had to be erected on the roof to protect people from their own despair.

The fact that it never collapsed was due to lack of interest in building risky structures. Namely, the rooms in the huge tower are small, the windows are a smaller proportion of the outer wall compared to the WTC which was mostly tall windows. So when a plane hit, it put a hole in one side but it couldn’t topple the structure which was knitted together very tightly following ancient building codes that evolved over thousands of years.

According to Malott, before the advent of the World Trade Center towers, high-rise buildings shared two vital characteristics: one, they were supported by a grid of steel columns, and two, the columns were encased in a tough cladding of reinforced concrete. This concrete created a fireproof skin designed to withstand a four-hour inferno. (The four-hour rating is a building industry standard for fireproofing) As designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki the Twin Towers incorporated neither of these traditional features. These features were found in most tall buildings before the Twin Towers came along and changed the equation. Malott claims that it was the failure to use the traditional steel column grid design and concrete coating on the steel columns that was the fatal flaw of the buildings--not the initial crashes, not the exploding jet fuel and not the subsequent fire alone.

In an attempt to cut weight--which is the enemy of all high-rise buildings--the designers of the Towers eliminated the traditional steel column grid. Instead, Yamasaki placed the steel columns in the perimeter of the outer walls of the buildings and in the perimeter of the small inner core of the buildings that housed the elevator shafts. This design allowed every floor to have unobstructed floor space with no interior supporting columns or beams.

In further attempts to save weight, time and money designers were allowed to fireproof the steel columns with spray-on mineral-wool fiber and layers of sheetrock instead of the traditional method of using reinforced concrete. The elevator shaft and the steel columns in those shaft walls were covered with sheetrock as well.

Today, thanks to modern building materials, people think they can ignore the lessons of the past. The Mall built by Rockefeller in Albany, for example, ignored the climate, the landscape and anything human. So in winter, it is a wind tunnel just like the WTC was, walking around the WTC in winter with the wind screaming around the corners was dangerous. Everyone used the underground tunnels just like they do today in Albany.

I once had to hail a cab outside of Building #1 in winter and the door of the cab was nearly torn out of my hands. In summer, the plaza was very hot and in winter, very cold. Ditto Albany. The WTC, when it was finished, opened right in the middle of a stockmarket crash that kept the market in the doldrums for years. Getting tenants was nearly impossible. It was regarded as a white elephant.

The Empire State Building along with the Chrysler Building, depressed rents in Midtown for many years too as the landlords tried to fill these buildings with tenants. The Empire State Building had less trouble than the WTC because it was a prestigious address.

The WTC, due to its big size, was harder to fill because it swayed in the wind during storms and the big size was oppressive. The elevators were really big and if one worked near the top, going up and down in the express elevators was like flying the Space Shuttle, you could feel the weightlessness as it dropped and the pressure when it shot up.

However, Sears' optimistic growth projections never came to pass. Competition from its traditional rivals (like Montgomery Ward) continued, only to be surpassed in strength by other retailing giants like Kmart, Kohl's, and Wal-Mart. Sears, Roebuck deteriorated as market share slipped away, and management grew paranoid and introverted through the 1970s.[1] The Sears Tower was not the draw Sears hoped it would be to potential lessees, and stood half-vacant for a decade as more office space was built in the 1980s. Finally, Sears was forced to take out a mortgage on their headquarters building. Sears began moving its offices out of the Sears Tower in 1993 and had completely moved out by 1995, moving to a new office campus in Hoffman Estates, Illinois.

There have been several owners of the Sears Tower since then. The owners who purchased the tower in March 2004 were rumored to have plans to rename the building.

Considered one of the finest locations for business in Chicago, the Sears Tower is now a multi-tenant office building with more than 100 different companies doing business there, including major law firms, insurance companies and financial services firms.

The hubris, the mocking sense of power of the President and board of directors of Sears was broken by the very monument they sought to erect. This is very common. One can see when a culture or situation is at an apex because they build giant, inappropriate or even unusable buildings.

It may be art to Arthur Wood, 75, who has lived in the Brooklyn building known as the Broken Angel for 27 years. But to the Department of Buildings, the hulking brick, wood and glass structure at 4 Downing Street in Clinton Hill is a glaring jumble of code violations, and yesterday it issued a formal order for him and his wife to vacate.

Liz O. Baylen for The New York Times

“I’m facing imminent eviction,” Mr. Wood, a self-taught architect and artist, said in a telephone interview. “This is Nazi tactics.”

The city’s Buildings Department inspected the four-story building on Thursday, two days after a fire in its rooftop addition. “Generally speaking, this building had numerous building-code violations that made it unfit to occupy,” said Jennifer Givner, a department spokeswoman.

After buying and moving in to the building, formerly the headquarters of the Brooklyn Trolley, in 1979, Mr. Wood gradually transformed it into a quirky piece of sculpture in and of itself, with an elaborate structure on top, partly exposed sides and intricate masonry. Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, has described it as “a Rubik’s Cube of a spaceship.”

LIke the WTC, this structure became a hazard for firemen trying to put out a fire that should have never started in the first place. Irresponsible structures kill people. There are many examples of this principle at work. In France, a country where frantic, strange, dangerous structures are praised and encouraged, a lunatical architect built a pedestrian way at the airport that suddenly collapsed totally, killing innocent users.

I consider this sort of ‘architecture’ to be criminal and anyone daring to build dangerous things should be charged with murder if they kill people.

The Hyatt Regency hotel walkway collapse was a major disaster that occurred on July 17, 1981 in Kansas City, Missouri, killing 114 people and injuring more than 200 others during a tea dance.

I was in the hospital when this happened. I remember looking at the destruction and just seeing pictures, I knew what went wrong. This was infuriating because it was painfully wrong, the method used to secure the platforms.

Both structural and design faults caused a large section of the newly constructed Terminal 2E at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport to collapse last May, killing 4 people and injuring 3.

An investigative commission under the direction of Jean Berthier, engineering Professor at France's Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chausées, concluded that the building's structure had been fragile from the outset. It then progressively degraded under use - principally from the side walkways - to the point where the structure gave way.

Berthier's report pointed to four connected causes: 1) insufficient or badly positioned structural steel; 2) lack of mechanical "redundancy," in that the stresses were concentrated and could not be shifted to other structural components; 3) concrete beams that offered too little resistance to stress and use, and 4) the positioning of metal supports within the structural concrete.

This alarmed the Chinese who hired the same clowns to design stuff in China. Of course, the very fact it collapsed meant the designers should stand trial. There is no other way to stop madcap building that is not carefully crafted and thought out.

There is the arrogance of the tribe of financiers who are, like the infamous Donald Trump, building frantically across the globe as they colonize psychological frontiers, are similar in hubris as previous mad dashes for the extreme as an expression of faith and power. In ancient Egypt, there was a rash of pyramid building. Each one was bigger than before until the Great Pyramid of Cheops was erected.

Then the whole thing ended as the culture struggled to deal with the destructive side of such out of control expressions of power. In ancient Rome, every thing became gigantic. To this day, the huge aquaducts that lace the landscape of France and Italy still boggle the mind. In Rome itself, the building of mega-structures continued right up to the very end, the public baths and stadiums were the last buildings erected for nearly 500 years as the whole culture collapsed.

In Medieval Europe, after 1000 AD, the mad rush to build ever bigger and more elaborate cathedrals ended in a rush with the building of unsupportable giants which collapsed when the Nave or Crossing couldn’t support the weight over the span. Always, at the terminal end of a building boom, architects experiment with the impossible and people die.

Between 1307 and 1311 the central tower was raised to its present height.

Around 1370 to 1400 the western towers were heightened.

All three towers had spires until 1549 when the central tower's spire blew down.

The central tower rises to 83 m (271 feet) and remains the tallest cathedral tower in Europe without a spire. Prior to the collapse of the lead-encased wooden spire, with the spire, the Cathedral rose to a height of 160 m (525 feet), making it at the time the world's tallest building. It was the first building to exceed the height of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Until the collapse of the spire, the Cathedral remained the world's tallest structure for more than two centuries. Looking eastwards, the next highest point was the Ural Mountains in Russia.

With growing assurance, architects in northern France, and soon all over Europe, competed in a race to conquer height. The vault of each new cathedral strained to surpass that of its predecessors by a few meters. The dramatic collapse in 1284 of the tallest among them, Beauvais, marked the vertical limits of Gothic architecture. Its choir and transept were rebuilt soon afterwards to the original 48 meters, now supported by twice as many flying buttresses.

The building of ever bigger Gothic cathederals ended with great suddeness: the Black Plague hit and Europe underwent a spasm of worker/peasant rebellions and dynastic battles that, coupled with the split in the Papacy, eroded support for ever-wilder projects.

Europe is dotted with cathederals that have only one or no completed towers, for example. Notre Dame is the most famous, normally, towers rise much higher than the church and have steepled roofs. Many churches shortend the Naves or left off the Choir. By 1500, many of the very expensive stained glass windows are vandalized during religous upheavals.

Almost none of the other buildings planned for Berlin was ever built. Berlin was to be reorganized along a central three-mile long avenue. At the north end, Speer planned to build an enormous domed building, the Volkshalle (people's hall), based on St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. The dome of the building would have been impractically large; it would be over seven hundred feet (200 meters) high and eight hundred feet (250 meters) in diameter, sixteen times larger than the dome of St. Peter's. At the southern end of the avenue would be an arch based on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, but again, much larger; it would be almost four hundred feet (100 meters) high, and the Arc de Triomphe would have been able to fit inside its opening.

Even as the flames rose over Germany, he dreamed of building inappropriate stuff. The same is true of Stalin. “Stalinesque’ means ugly, dreary, poorly planned buildings that don’t work with real humans. This madman was focused on humiliating, torturing and then working to death or killing many populations just as if he were the dwarf, Alberich, in the Wagner operas. Just like Bush thinks he, too, is an all-conquering Siegfried, so did Hitler presume. He, like Bush, noted all the 'victories' on the battlefield while ignoring the harsh truth that every trimumph simply make his defeat more certain.

When this latest cycle of hyper-building is done, people will shake their heads as one ‘great’ structure after another is demoished because they are impossible to use, dangerous or hideously expensive to repair. The Mall in Albany had to be entirely rebuilt, the outside marble covering falling apart very dangerously, everything leaking, upheaving in the frost/thaw cycles, my husband’s health was permenantly damaged by Rockefeller’s buildings. He worked in one and thanks to the poor air circulation, he was harmed by chemicals and had to retire early.

I wish I could kick the architect where it really hurts.

Anyone offering awards for buildings must first consider the people who are doomed to use the places. If they have any defects that endanger lives, the architect should be removed and forbiddenn to build. And don’t even ask me how many people have died building all these big places.

Too many. Way too many. Even the WTC had a steady stream of dead before the first terrorist even dreamed of making things worse.

I have rebuilt the foundations of more than one building in my own time including a spectacular saving of a Victorian 'flying tower' that was on the verge of collapse. So this Xinhua story intersts me a great deal. I wish I could see the plans suggested for saving the world's biggest historic pagoda!

YINGXIAN, Shanxi, Sept. 3 (Xinhua) -- Chinese scientists have been seeking ways to prolong the life of a 950-year-old wooden pagoda in northern Shanxi Province by another millennium, but they are still baffled over how to do it.

The Sakyamuni Pagoda with unique architectural, religious and historical values is located at the Fogong (Buddha's Palace) Temple in Shanxi's Yingxian County, 380 km southwest of Beijing. It was built in 1056 during the Liao Dynasty, which ruled North China from 916 to 1125. China will celebrate the 950th anniversary of the pagoda on Sept. 5.

Experts have proposed three options: dismantle it and rebuild it with the original timber parts and technology; elevate the top three stories to fix the two bottom stories and then place the top three back to position; reinforce the damaged and twisted parts with steel structures, said Fu Xi'nian, a research fellow with the Institute of Architectural History under the Beijing-based China Architecture Design and Research Group.

No building lasts long if it has a bad foundation. I often beg people designing or building a new home to please spend extra money on the foundation putting in drainage pipes, putting in the right subsoil fill, coating the walls not only with tar but sticking waterproof barriers onto the tar, sealing the cement. Using lots and lots and then even more rebars, etc. Of course, this takes away money that can be used to put in frills and follies that everyone can admire!

So this advice often goes into the ether, in one ear and out the other.

This is beyond stupid. I have fixed houses that were less than 20 years old! Water and insects, both following Mother Nature's laws to go where they may and do what they want, can rapidly eat away the foundations or wood supports of a building!

Any building more than 300 years old that is still standing is a testiment to the builder's care in preparing the foundation and following generations keeping the roof in good repair. The Acropolis in Greece wasn't destroyed because of the foundation, for example, for it is set on a massive rock outcropping that is very solid. It could stand for thousands of years more except for the destruction caused by human beings. The roof was allowed to fail, then the Ottoman military stored munitions there and it blew up. Incredible! Gah!

Of course, roaring wars and the military are probably the number one destroyer of buildings, bar none except volcanoes and tsunamis or meteroite strikes.

Both plans called for huge steel structures -- Southeast University's needs 1,300 tons and Taiyuan University of Technology's needs 4,000 tons -- to be set up around the pagoda, which will inevitably cause "severe disturbances" to the pagoda and produce "unpredictable consequences," Ma said.

In addition, the plans would take as much as 90 million yuan (11.25 million U.S. dollars), and about six to 10 years to repair the pagoda, he said. "That is really terrifying."

I always tell people, when a problem with the foundation is too big, it is nearly as expensive to save a building as it is to replace it. With a historic structure with the history of this building, saving it is very important. In Japan, they commonly tear down old temples and replace the interior structure with new timbers and then reassemble the ornate woodwork that sheaths the main frame. The need to replace the weightbearing timbers of the Chinese pagoda is of highest importance because once a structure's stress load has disarranged the connective fibers within a piece of wood, it is permenantly weakened.

Wood can fail very suddenly. I was called to save a 'flying tower' in New Jersey years ago. Flying towers were very popular in Victorian times but nearly all of them have since collapsed because the way they were built was very serioiusly flawed from a technical point of view. In this case, this being one of only a few dozen houses with flying towers of any considerable size left on the East Coast, I decided to see what the internal structure was. The tower was leaning off kilter by 6 degrees from vertical which wasn't so bad except I had this fear it might be worse than it looked. The entire structure had a very bad foundation of fancy brickwork which was rapidly losing its integrity due to the loss of cement between the bricks, a common problem with many old Victorian buildings. I decided to remove some of the wood ceiling of the porch near where the tower attached to the building.

The minute I half-pried the first board, there was this onimous 'creak, creak, creak' sound as if a giant was walking over the floor above my head. I dropped the crowbar and hammer and ran.

It didn't fall. BARELY. We had to assume the thing was going to collapse entirely and I had to first build an elaborate scaffolding around the tower and under the tower and then begin demolition of the ceiling. The only thing attaching the tower to the main building was one floor joist! The other 12 joists were detached and three of them were crushed laterally by a century of weight of the tower which was three stories tall.

I didn't restore the original structure because the original builders, following the favored techniques of the day, built a really crummy design, namely, it was build to fail. Instead of curving the outside sill, I installed a sub structure of steel i-beams that ran around the perimeter in a heptagon shape. Instead of three pillars, I used four to hold it up. Within each pillar which reproduced the original, I inserted steel posts. The original foundation was only a foot deep. I sank holes four feet deep and put in much wider footings, 2'x2'. Instead of a wood brace holding up all the floor joists, I used long bolts to bolt a steel L brace to the main beams of the main house and then bolted L braces onto each floor joist of the tower and bolted those to the brace attached to the house.

China Culture: The pagoda was built on a stone platform four meters high. Around the upper edge and at the corners of the platform there are sculptures of crawling lions whose simple and unsophisticated style belongs to the Liao Dynasty. The exterior of the pagoda is divided into five levels, but there are actually nine levels in the interior, including four built-in storeys. The ground floor has a ring of side corridors and eaves, so it has a total six-layer eaves, the lower two formed into multiple eaves. Under each of the succeeding four layers there is a further dark layer, so the structure actually has nine layers. The exterior of the dark layer is called "level seating" which is a ring of corridors with balustrades around the pagoda itself. Each floor consists of inner and outer rings of pillars. The pillars on each floor slant slightly inward, the plane size diminishing floor by floor, although the figure remains stable. The windowless outer walls on the ground floor, the added enclosing corridors and eaves all strengthen the sense of stability.

The steeple of the pagoda is ten meters high; the whole pagoda, 67.31 meters high. The diameter of the octagonal first storey is 30.27 meters, the longest among ancient pagodas.

In Europe, there are still astonishing examples of such wood work still standing. When I lived there, I would ask people living in ancient buildings to let me into the attic to see the roof's structure. It gave me many satisfying hours, sketching these places. Since most castles were blown apart by wars, one could see inside the walls, for example. I have never been to Asia. I would love to see how they solved the many problems of buidling heavy, durable structures. Just like I see all over the place, when people in America build walls to hold back the mighty earth on hillsides and slopes, they nearly always build vertically instead of sloping back into the mass of earth pushing outwards! This is really stupid. Invariably, no matter what materials are used, the wall will be pushed from the top outwards until it topples over. So why do this?